There hasn’t been a lot of talk of the most obvious game play change in the Elemental universe. We call them Wild Lands.

We got rid of “minor races” in Fallen Enchantress.  We had bigger plans for them. And those bigger plans manifest themselves in the form of wild lands. These are chunks of the world that are still trying to hold on to the pre-cataclysm days.

There’s a bunch of different ones, all that look different and feel different. 

You don’t go into the Wild Lands unless, you know, you want to die.  Badly.  But if you are powerful enough to survive there, it’s filled with amazing stuff. A lot of AI work has been put into running the wild lands and in getting the AI to try to take them on (at this stage, I haven’t had a lot of success with the latter, they’re very dangerous places).

To use classic game mechanic terms, thing of Wild Lands as being like Orion (or Antares). If you can take it’s really awesome. But don’t expect to be able to.

You know the #1 suckiest thing about writing AI for me?

It’s that not only do I have to play in cloth map only mode (I run with massive debugging) but I have to run in ugly cloth map mode.

I’m not going to say I hate every single person on this planet. I’m sure there are people living in deserts and jungles who are just fine. I still hate them, mind you. It’s out of principle. So yea, I guess I do hate everything.

Until I am freed from having to play the game like this, I’m going to be one grumpy bastard. You gotta feel kind of bad for Stardock. A real company wouldn’t let one of its devs even post this kind of inanity. But of course, I’m the boss so I can post how annoying it is to play the game at 3fps in cloth map mode. 

There’s nothing that can be done. I did GalCiv that way too. People cried. Their tears were delicious and nourishing.  But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough.

One of the things that is giving me fits in Fallen Enchantress is getting delicate units to a dangerous place safely.

The classic case, sending a pioneer to claim a new area – but without getting killed on the way.

The hardest part of writing AI isn’t coming up with *A* away to solve a problem. It is solving the problem that doesn’t require a lot of coding time AND doesn’t doesn’t eat up a lot of CPU.

So, for instance, I don’t have the luxury that you humans have of looking at the path a unit generates between A and B and see what’s dangerous. That would be immensely expensive. 

Similarly, while providing a body guard for a unit is another path to take, the problem there is that you could really slow down your expansion and get wiped out by the human player who is able to make better decisions.

So with Impulse over to Gamestop and the digital distribution competition no longer something we’re participating in we’ve developed a new digital updating client – Stardock Central (what’s old is new again).

But unlike the old “big” client, the new one is very…very simple.

(sorry for the lame screenshot, I’m caught up on my games on this new machine and haven’t installed any apps yet).

Your Stardock purchases will show up here once you login. Just pick what you want to install (or update) and press a button and it’ll use our massively fast CDN to install it (we have a long-term agreement with our CDN except now the only thing using its bandwidth is our stuff so the download speeds are kind of ridiculous – it’s like being the only guy on a 1 gigabyte line).

The new settings includes an option to have it simply update your software automatically.  So you can either choose to stick with older versions or always have it up to date.

..

OK, let’s say you don’t like to have to install a client at all.  That’s fine too.  You can update your software and games via the web as well:

Pick whether it’s software or games and it’ll look at your account, when you last updated, and off you go.  The installer will figure out what you need to install (i.e. if you have multiple machines with different versions) and off you go.

It’s designed to be as streamlined as possible.

UPDATE: TRY THE LATEST VERSION HERE:

https://www.stardock.com/products/stardockcentral/

Elemental has rally points.

Oh, you guys don’t get them. There’s no UI for it presently. But they’re there. Just like in Galactic Civilizations but much more sophisticated.

Did I mention you guys don’t get them right now?

One of the things I’ve been working on is getting the AI to use them in ways far beyond what I’ve done in GalCiv or other AI’s before.  Using rally points intelligently (and without using a lot of CPU time) is a serious trick.

Now, in the screenshot above, the AI’s archer army is building up just outside of town even though those armies had to collect together from a very long way away.

While simple on the surface to do, there’s a lot of thought that has to go into making this work (otherwise, the player could just figure out where the rally points are and station an army there ready to pick them off, there’s a lot of timing involve to make sure units aren’t vulnerable long).

One of the big but largely under-appreciated features of Elemental: Fallen Enchantress is the new random generation.

In Elemental: War of Magic, the maps were random but the continents were not.  This meant, after awhile, players knew “the lay out of the land”.

Now, having a random world generator is a non-trivial thing as those who have written them can tell you. Especially if you want a map that is “fun” (i.e. no one cut off, reasonably fair, and always interesting).

So here are 3 random starting locations to give you a taste of how different things are from game to game.

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Now all this is only interesting if the worlds themselves are interesting. And this is a tough thing because interesting is in the eye of the beholder.

On tiny maps, we made the continents kind of square-ish so we could fit as much “stuff” on the map as we could. But as you get larger, the interesting shaped continents really come into play.  You will never see that world I just posted again because it was randomly generated.

At tradeshows I’ve talked to my friends at Firaxis (Civilization series) about the map generation “challenge” and it is one of the most programming intensive pieces of strategy game writing.

The philosophy of random map generation is different from game to game. Are we looking for “realistic” or “fun” or somewhere in-between?  For Fallen Enchantress, we focused on continents that are interesting and otherworldly that present a lot of opportunity for choke points and exploration.

Here’s another one you’ll never see again:

For those of you not familiar with Elemental, I’m using a cheat key to hide the fog of war (and yea, I’m gonna call it that because I’m lazy).  So it wouldn’t look quite like this in an actual game as you wouldn’t get to see all this at once.

We heard endless about the unsubstantiated charge that some Tea Partier spat on an African American congressman but amazingly, the atrocious behavior of the Occupy movement has largely been ignored or excused.

I have friends and family who practically seethe with hatred towards “fucking tea baggers” who I know are sympathetic for the Occupy Wall Street people. What the hell is the matter with these people?

While I don’t consider myself a “Tea Partier”, I cannot grasp the antipathy directed towards people who peacefully lobby for smaller government while remaining mum about the disgusting OWS behavior.

Check this out:

For those of you new to Stardock’s games, let me say, welcome! We’re glad you’re here!

For those of you who are veterans, thanks for hanging out with us.

I want to make sure users are fully aware, because it comes up sometimes, that we have intentions/plans for many things and on the other hand we have promises/requirements/obligations.

The former means, we intend to do something but it is not a guarantee. The latter means, yes, it’ll be in there.

Let’s start for the promises for FE:

1. It won’t be released until we are happy with it.  Now, truth be told, I was pretty happy with WOM.  I was, as many may recall, working 100+ hours per week for the entire Summer before it was released.  With Derek in charge, I can go back to my traditional Executive producer role (ala GalCiv and Sins of a Solar Empire and to a lesser extent Demigod) which usually involves me pooping on the game for months prior to release and telling everyone internally how terrible the game is. I much prefer to distribute the insults rather than aborb them.
2. The campaign will be good and engaging.
3. The randomly generated maps will include randomly generated continents. WOM had randomly generated maps on pre-built continents.
4. There will be a lot of spells. I don’t know what the final count will be. But they will be interesting, important, and exciting.
5. There will be a lot of soul to the game. The players will talk to you in interesting ways. There is a lot of backstory for pretty much everything.
6. There will be a lot more quests. There’s a ton of quests in FE. And unlike in WOM, where the quests were virtually all written by me in the middle of the night in the final several weeks (don’t ask me why I had to write these…) these quests are a collaboration between fantasy author David Stern and Toby (associate producer).
7. Tactical Battles are totally different than WOM. It’s all initiative based now. No more “rounds”. Eliminates a ton of potential cheese and makes magic and tactics matter more.
8. EVERYONE who bought Elemental: War of Magic in 2010 will get FE for free. Automatically.

Now, let’s talk about intentions for FE:

1. We intend for there to be spells with a casting time that can then be countered.  This is almost certain to make it in but we have not made it a “Requirement”.  It’ll be based on how “fun” they play out.
2. We intend there to be multiplayer of up to 16 people. However, it is not a requirement. If it would result in a lot of resources being siphoned off from the single player experience or would, on its own, result in delaying the release, it’ll get cut.
3. We intend to have vastly more modding abilities in than any game we’ve ever made.  Actually, this is more close to a promise because the game is almost exclusively XML driven because of the project management system (coders don’t implement game design, the producers do and it’s XML driven via spread sheets and such). The AI makes heavy use of this. 
4. We intend to have a almost completely new sound track. This isn’t a promise. We’ve gotten a lot of new music and effects in and have put them in but we wouldn’t delay the game over making sure all the music and sound is new.
5. We intend to have Fallen Enchantress at retail. But because we won’t commit to a release date, we can’t promise this.
6. We intend to have significant faction differentiation. In War of Magic, the Empires all shared the same tech tree and the Kingdoms had their own. Other than that, each faction only had minor differences.  Now, all of the factions are humanoids (we don’t have a spider race, for instance) but we intend for each faction to look and play very differently. How successful we are on this will be in the eye of the beholder.  But we will be making a best effort here to make them as different as we can as budget allows (i.e. we’re not willing to push the date back so that we can have an insectoid race.

Over the years, I’ve seen so many people with high potential diminish their prospects for success in business because they lacked a few key axioms of business.

To that end, I’d like to share a few things I’ve learned (often the hard way) about what is what in business:

#1 Risk capital trumps “sweat equity”.  The guy willing to risk real dollars is worth 100X as much as the guy who is willing to “risk” working hard for some period of time. If you disagree, you’ve probably never remortgaged your house to pay for something you believe in.

#2 NEVER burn bridges.  If you read Steve Jobs book, one of the things that becomes clear is that this is a person who, while often mean, was pretty good at maintaining relationships. Even after Steve Jobs founded Apple, he would regularly go back to his former employer (Atari) and get advice or help in some form or other. 

#3 It really is “just business”.  If it is good for the company, it is good for the company. A fierce competitor today may be a partner tomorrow. Don’t make business decisions from a place of emotion. I’ve had to overrule managers in teaming up with companies because those companies had competed with us in some unrelated area in the past. It’s just business.

#4 Understand your compensation system.  You pay people for a specific reason. A reason that should be clearly defined and understood by both parties. Never compensate someone to try to win “good will”.  I’ve learned this the hard way. No matter how big the bonus for a “job well done” it will rarely build long-term loyalty or good will. Once you start own that road, people will become resentful because in their mind their contribution to the success on a project is always far greater than your estimation of their contribution (see rule #1 for a common example). The best policy is to have a very clear compensation plan and abide by it scrupulously.

#5 Separate your business life from your personal life. This can be hard to do but not doing it will cost you in the long-run. Your business is a tool to accomplish a set of goals that are determined by you (and your fellow stock holders). It’s amazingly easy, over time, to lose the reason you have your business in the first place.

Derek is currently putting the first FE build of the AI (first build I've checked in) through its paces.

It's a 3 person game, tiny map.

We'll see how it goes.

As the 0.26 version makes clear, the AI is about 25% done.

I'd put the odds of him winning at about 50/50.

The AI is still pretty piss poor compared to what it'll eventually be.